Further
up the shoreline of Lake Sunnydale, casual comments were traded back
and forth among the Scooby Gang.

"So,
G-man, I'm sure back when you were just a Watcher that you would
have put something like this down in your journal as, 'The Slayer
summoned the demon.' Keeping things totally dull and dry as dust,
nothing interesting, sending all your readers to sleep---"

"Really,
Xander, the whole point of maintaining a historical record is to
ensure documentation of what exactly took place, not to provide
entertaining literature."

"That's
too bad. I bet if you wrote exactly what she's doing right now,
your stuff would sell like hotcakes, Giles."

"Dawn,
dear Lord…."

Down
by the lake, Buffy had unbuttoned and unzipped her pants, slid her
thumbs down between the skin of her hips and the sides of her jeans
and panties, and shoved these items of clothing down to her knees
while bending over, and still staying in that position, she started
making twenty-foot length hops across the ground, all while mooning
the entire area.

"Elizabeth
Anne Summers! How dare you act in such an unladylike manner!"

Abruptly
coming to a halt, Buffy calmly brought up her pants and underwear as
she straightened, and then she refastened and adjusted all her
clothing to correctness, before turning around to meet the gaze of
the person standing before her.

An
indignant Joyce Summers stared at her daughter.

"DO
YOU HAVE ANY IDEA JUST HOW UNIMAGINATIVE YOU ARE?! PLUS, BECAUSE
YOU'RE NOT ANGEL, I JUST LOST A SHOE BET WITH MY SISTER!"

The
signal of Buffy's venting was followed by Willow closing her eyes
and finally casting the spell at the area where the Slayer was
standing while yelling at something none of the other members of the
Scooby Gang could perceive.

A
solid metal sphere twenty feet in radius promptly appeared around
Buffy, with the air and the ground surrounding the woman transmuting
into steel and other materials with such care and skill that the
Slayer's feet didn't move despite now standing on the glassy
interior of the sphere, nor did the globe shift in the hollow in the
ground it was now resting upon, as solid as rock.

In
the total darkness inside the sphere, a mocking voice spoke, sounding
exactly like her mother, but in a tone of total contempt that had
never come from the woman Buffy Summers had loved more than anyone
else in the entire world. "You do remember that I'm immaterial
and can move anywhere? There's no cage, either of man or magic,
that can hold me."

Buffy
smiled toothily in the dark while replying, "It's not a cage, you
idiot. It's a trap."

At
that, the only living being inside the sphere vanished.

The
First Evil froze, and then it began warily looking around the
artifact it was currently inside. Its first thought was to leave at
once, but suppose that set off the trap? Gingerly, it started
examining with all the mystical power it possessed the strange object
containing itself, and over the next few moments, it slowly began
regaining its arrogance. While this….thing stank of the potent
magic of the witch, the sphere seemed to be doing nothing at all.
What, then, was the whole point of this?

Buffy
appeared out of thin air an arm's-length in front of Willow, so
deftly that there was no need to shift her feet or legs to keep her
balance. The witch, along with the other three people by her, had
her eyes closed, and an instant after the Slayer's arrival, Willow
opened her eyes. As she met her friend's uncanny gaze, Buffy
remembered what had happened months ago back in the Scottish castle.

Willow
sighed, looking around at the blank faces of the others in the
castle's sitting room when she began explaining her plan. She
tried again. "Remember Halloween, Xander, Buffy? I turned into a
spirit when Ethan's spell hit my ghost costume. Incorporeal,
intangible, unable to be affected by anything in the material world
--- but I could still see you both in your costumes and also
everything else in Sunnydale during that night. Which was
impossible. Light should have passed through me and my eyes, just as
if I were invisible, with me becoming blind. But that didn't
happen. I could see --- which meant an insubstantial being did
interact with the material world in some way."

Buffy
said the first thing she could think of. "But, but, Willow, that
was….magic!"

Willow
snuggled back into her easy chair and hummed a few bars of a specific
Lovin' Spoonful tune, smirking at the blonde woman trying to stifle
her giggles when she recognized the song. The redhead looked at the
others in the room, her amusement subsiding, as she added, "Trust
me, guys, I'm now more than capable of doing things Ethan could
only dream about in his eagerness to create chaos."

A
flicker of pain went over Giles' features at the mention of his
former friend, though there was no sign of his regret in his calm
statements. "We're going up against our most powerful enemy,
Willow. Are you quite confident about this?"

With
a grave expression, Willow gently rubbed her palm against her
stomach's slight bulge, and nodded, saying, "Giles, everyone, back
then, we just reacted to things --- we danced to its
tune. But now, we have time to develop our
plans, to use what we've learned. We can think things out, draw on
our experiences --- Goddess, in Sunnydale, why didn't we ever
remember I was a ghost once? If we'd just put our minds to it, I'm
sure we could have come up with something, anything, to actually
fight it! Instead of having to wait until years later when an idea
came from someone who's a much bigger geek than I ever was, and let
me tell you, it's pretty hard to be geekier than putting up posters
on your bedroom wall of Steve Jobs, Stephen Hawking, and Albert
Einstein!"

The
witch then switched her attention to another's confused face, as
Xander slowly said, "Uh, Wils, you got that
from Andrew's five-minute riff about Sauron and Ringwraiths that
caused everybody's eyes in the room to glaze over? He didn't
stop talking until the closest Slayer to him, Jessica, grabbed the
popcorn bowl out of his lap and overturned it on his head! I agreed
with him back then 'cause it made a half-assed sense, and just so
he wouldn't repeat it again!"

"Just
one sentence he said, actually," smiled Willow at Xander. '"To
paraphrase him, 'An immaterial foe must be met with an immaterial
weapon.'"

The
man muttered, "You gotta spray more saliva and also put on a
true-dork expression to do a better impersonation of him, God help
us."

"Actually….that's
part of it."

"What?!"
exclaimed the entire room.

"We're
going to ask for help."

Dawn,
like the others, stared at the witch in absolute incredulity, and
just managed to blurt out, "Help --- what kind --- from who? You
can't be talking about the Powers That Be!"

Xander
snarled, "Damn straight! Back at Sunnydale, those assholes were
probably taking bets on how many of us survived or died! We've
done okay without them sticking in their noses since then, probably
'cause Buffy would
tear out their ribcage and wear it as a hat, if they ever dared to
show up again! If you didn't do something worse to 'em before
she had a chance!" The angry man subsided back into the sofa as
Faith by his side took his hand in her own and squeezed it in
reassurance.

Everyone
else in the room unconsciously nodded their heads at Xander's
opinion. In all the years since the collapse of the California town,
the Sunnydale survivors thankfully had no contact with those
manipulative so-called higher beings, despite such events as the
disappearance of Angel and his comrades later. Various opinions on
the reasons for this included Xander's bloodthirsty suggestion, the
unlikely possibility that the Scooby Gang had fulfilled their
destinies, or that the PTB were just waiting for some other upcoming
disaster to start treating the people in the room as puppets again.

Not
even Willow, with all her immense mystic power, knew the correct
answer to that, and the witch was more than content to leave it
alone. Which was why she shook her head at the others' error.
"I'm not talking about those jerks. Whatever they might think,
they're not the be-all and end-all in this universe. No, I meant
help from….elsewhere. Beyond. Higher."

"If
you're talkin' 'bout who I'm thinkin', what makes ya think
we're gonna get help?" quavered Faith, shivering a little.
Without thinking about it, she squeezed again Xander's hand for
comfort and relaxed a fraction as he squeezed back, and leaned
against her. Faith put her head against Xander's shoulder and
worriedly stared at the witch.

Willow
gave them all a beatific smile and quietly said, "We've already
had it." At their bewildered expressions, she continued, "Look
at us all now, and think about what we all did to each other back
then. All the pain and the tragedies….but we got past it, to
become a family. We fought, sacrificed, and won. All by using
emotions and feelings that couldn't be touched or seen. Love.
Hope. Forgiveness. Friendship. Our enemy has his own weapons that
are just as insubstantial: Fear. Dissension. Doubt. Suspicion.
They can be fought against, and we've done it. Now, we're going
to put up all we have, and use our powers to go up against something
that has its own adversary, that I'm sure already helped us."

As
she looked at her friends' faces with their looks of dawning wonder
and expectation, Willow continued, "At the very least, we can ask.
We have that right, as do all humans on this world. And even if
nothing comes from it, well, it can't hurt, and it might help, when
we start what Xander is gonna call a really KICK-ASS spell!"

At
the end of Willow's speech that finished with a wild whoop, the
Scooby Gang had their faces shining with the light of coming battle.
As the redhead continued explaining her plan, they listened intently,
though at the conclusion, Buffy and Faith, with their Slayer hearing,
glanced curiously at each other at overhearing Dawn softly muttering
something about the power of love and the power of arithmetic….

By
Lake Sunnydale, staring straight at the Slayer, eyes of pure green,
solid colored with no sign of human iris or pupil, eyes that bore the
power of the entire planet examined the diminutive woman before her,
and the Red Witch opened her mouth and murmured in the whisper of all
growing life as manifested by her child in her womb, "Speak."

The
man to the right of Buffy opened his right eye, now pure brown, and
said in a voice holding the clash of weapons defending loved ones,
"Protect."

Looking
over Willow's head, the Watcher's pure gray eyes opened, and from
his lips came the soft susurration of all the pages sweeping open of
every book ever created that formed, "Know."

Smiling,
Dawn bestowed on her sister both a look from her pure sea-green eyes
and a single word chiming with the music of the cosmos, "Open."

Totally
without fear, Buffy reached out to place her hands on Willow's
shoulders, her thumbs touching the sides of Giles' hands, as Xander
and Dawn brought their free hands around to place these on the
Slayers' own shoulders. The hazel eyes of the California girl
remained unchanged, as someone who had known heaven tilted back her
head, casting her gaze upwards, to entreat, "Please."

The
appeal was heard, and answered.

Inside
the sphere, a puzzled First Evil ignored the faintest trace of magic
that subtly changed the inner mirrored glass into….absolute
perfection. The inside of the globe was now an exact round solid
figure well past impossibility without even the tug of gravity
distorting it, the surface of the interior's mirror was now
smoother than humanity could polish it down to the atomic level and
beyond, and all of its substance was now totally pure, with no traces
of unwanted material to ruin things. Uncontaminated. Untainted.

Yet,
the most powerful part of the spell was something as intangible as
the monster inside it, and nothing would have come of the efforts of
the Scooby Gang if they hadn't shown this in their work and
dedication, in their lives and beliefs, in their love and devotion to
each other.

Loyalty.
Trust. Faith.

Instantly,
the eyes of every human there blazed pure white, and from their
throats came words of power that shuddered every molecule of their
bodies.

"FIAT
LUX!"

Let
there be light.

And
this came to pass.

Next
to the fiend inside Willow's spell construct, much faster than it
could react, appeared a speck of the First Light, the Light of
Creation.

Several
months before this, all while he crammed popcorn into his mouth,
Andrew had cheerfully burbled, "….immaterial, right? But what
would happen (crunch)
if you had a totally honkin' light inside a perfect mirror holding
the First Evil? There's a really, really cool video on Youtube
showing weird to the max when it was tried, and well (munch),
I mean, that, um, guy's --- thing's connected to vampires,
right?, and they can't been seen in mirrors, and, uh (gulp),
they go right into ashes in the slightest sunlight, which can't be
burning them all that much, maybe it's got to do with photons being
both a wave and a particle, which is just as impossible as that Big
Bad, and you know, I bet a Slayer could kick a Nazgul's butt 'cause
like the book says, they're not a man or….HEY!" It all ended
with the Scooby Gang coming back to what remained of Sunnydale after
listening to a man who had casually tossed off a suggestion just
before he was forced into wearing an item of cookery as a hat. Not
that the group named after a cartoon dog hadn't before tried just
as ridiculous strategies that, well, had worked. Leading an
independent observer to contemplate the possibility of some
other….being subtly on their side.

What
now existed inside the interior of the sphere after the celestial
illumination materialized, to be reflected to infinity, as it bounced
off the whole of the globe, was well past the comprehension of
humans, save for a simple fact: All was revealed. Nothing could be
hidden, as the First Evil was shown exactly in a single moment of
frozen time what the ungodly could not bear, the totality of its
emptiness and non-being. An insubstantial creature met something
just as non-material as itself, yet there was far more power in a
truth brought to the monster than every bit of its evil.

It
was nothing. A null, a nonentity, a void in creation, nil, something
that didn't exist….and it now knew this.

With
this understanding came….an ending. The First Evil no longer was,
passing out of existence.

Without
the slightest disturbance, the entire universe shifted to fill in the
infinitesimal part of the cosmos that had once been occupied by a
now-vanished foul entity.

The
large metal sphere resting on the shoreline of a new lake now
disappeared like a popped soap bubble, leaving behind just a concave
depression in the ground that would be filled in during the next
winter rains. It was the only memorial a quickly-forgotten monster
would ever receive.

Right
after the sphere vanished, the Scooby Gang shuddered and broke apart,
staggering on their feet, as every one of them stared at each other
with their now-normal eyes, and spoke in unison, "Gone!"

At
that instant, every human on earth felt a moment's joy. Danger,
iniquity, sorrow, wickedness, even the evil men could do still
existed and must be dealt with, but a bit of humanity's soul was
now cleansed.

Others
were not pleased by this. At all.

From
every one of the hell dimensions, and even from those calling
themselves on the side of good that had plans for the First Evil,
came screams of rage and wrath at those who had dared this.
Vengeance and revenge was plotted, with all the exact minuscule
beings causing such trouble about to undergo absolute torment beyond
anyone's measure--

NO.

The
calm certainty that rang around the whole of existence came from the
One Above All, freezing beings of lesser power into immobility.

FAIRLY
WON WAS THE CONFLICT. CHOICES WERE MADE, THE SUMMONS ANSWERED, AND
THE WARNING UNHEEDED. FREE WILL, MY GIFT TO ALL, RULED, AND TO THE
VICTORS MY PROTECTION.

There
was now more than a hint of doom for those defying, and
also….amusement.

LEAVE
THE SCOOBY GANG ALONE.

Far
below, on the material plane of existence, Xander felt an unexpected
surge of elation, and he happily announced, "Well, we've won, and
now it's time for the traditional post-Big Bad party." He
grinned at his family, and held out his hands, while continuing.

"Wanna
dance, pretty ladies?"

The
bright moon looked down to the shores of Lake Sunnydale to observe
the following:

Willow
waddled around, shrieking with glee, as her Xander-shaped friend
goofily danced in circles around her, stopping after every few absurd
steps to drop down and dart towards his bestest bud in a crouching
Groucho Marx lope to bestow tummy-smooches on her protruding belly.

Buffy
bounced and strutted around her Sunnydale comrades in a highly
risible cheerleader routine, shaking in her hands imaginary pom-poms
and performing enthusiastic high kicks, flips, somersaults, and
mid-air splits, all of which would have caused a total riot if
presented to any stadium audience.

Giles
and Dawn stalked past, their limbs flashing, as they performed a
truly wicked tango that Gomez and Morticia Addams would have
considered a trifle extreme.

Finally,
all of the Scooby Gang, their laughter raising as high as the
heavens, joined together under the light of the full moon, to do the
Snoopy Dance.

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